The invention pertains to an envelope-filling station for mail-processing systems, whereby this envelope-filling station belongs to a general design as known from German Patent Application 100 15 756 A1, for example.
The known envelope-filling station of this type provides that an envelope-conveying device has, starting from an envelope-separating arrangement, a course that is parallel to a conveying path for the conveying of enclosures or sets of enclosures, and exhibits at its end aligning means in the form of stops that can be adjusted to the envelope format, in such a way that an intermediate envelope-conveying device, which, in the known envelope-filling station, has a conveying direction that is perpendicular to the conveying direction of the conveying path for the enclosures, receives an envelope that has been conveyed by the envelope-conveying device in a precisely aligned state and transports it by means of gripping between, on the one hand, an envelope-conveying belt that is guided over an envelope table, and on the other, a roller strip that can be lowered onto the envelope-conveying belt, upstream of a push-in arrangement of the envelope-filling station, again in a precise position, and stops there so that the filling of the envelopes with enclosures or sets of enclosures can subsequently continue, after the mentioned roller strip has been raised. Afterwards, the roller strip is again lowered onto the filled envelope and the envelope-conveying belt is put into operation in such a way that the filled envelope is conveyed away.
One can see that with this inherently very advantageous design for aligning the envelope during the conveying sections in the region of the envelope-conveying device, considerable mechanical effort and control effort has to be conducted in the region of the intermediate envelope-conveying device running perpendicular to that, as well as upstream of the push-in station.
Up to now, this effort has been accepted particularly because the arrangement of the envelope-conveying device parallel to and alongside the conveying path for the enclosures or sets of enclosures placed at about the same level as this conveying path has proven to be advantageous for the adjusting, monitoring and general operation by an operator, since during setup, along with the envelope-separating arrangement and the envelope-conveying device the operator can also oversee and access the push-in arrangement and the feeding device for the enclosures or sets of enclosures.
In certain designs of push-in arrangements, considerable effort in terms of the adjusting and control of the working cycles of the push-in arrangement on the one hand and on the other, the intermediate envelope-conveying device and conveying devices for conveying the filled envelopes away, also arises from the fact that the conveying away of the filled envelopes is reliably to take place only if the push-in parts or push-in fingers of the push-in arrangement have been withdrawn from the region of the envelope that has been filled and is to be conveyed away.